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Sunday, July 22, 2012

Who should be sweating about Ontario's drought?

Here in Ottawa it’s been hot and dry for weeks now. The
grass in most parks and back yards is burnt crispy brown, the lilacs are
wilting, and the mosquitoes are few and far between. It’s the same situation
across southern Ontario and western Quebec, and conditions are even worse
across much of the Midwestern and eastern US. With the exception of a few
intense thunderstorms rumbling along to bring flash amounts of rain to
particular locations, there’s no precipitation in the long term forecast.

By this time in July, the corn should have pollinated and
begun to form ears, and the soybeans should be growing nicely in their pods.
But that’s not happening. The corn is stunted and under stress, and the
soybeans are looking poorly. Dry spells can occur at any time of the year, but
mid-June through mid-July is an especially bad time, since it comes when most
of our main field crops here in the east are setting seed heads, pods or fruit.
If it gets dry in August or after, that’s less critical, since the crops are
well under way. Without rain soon, many farmers in the east can expect very
poor harvest, if they get much of anything at all. We’ve already lost most of
the apple crop and many of the soft fruit crops because of an early spring heat
wave and a late frost; I have yet to see a locally grown field tomato or a cuke
at my local farmstand. About the only crop that seems to have done OK is the
winter wheat, which had already formed a seed head before the drought came, at least
in the fields I’ve seen. But wheat’s a minor player on the Ontario crop scene,
most people grow a mix of corn and soybeans. It’s just not a good year to be an
Ontario farmer.

The stock markets have already taken notice. The futures
price of most crops has soared, even for crops like wheat, which is not being
affected by the current drought. North American export wheat is primarily grown
on the Great Plains, where rain hasn’t been scarce this year (except for
Colorado and Wyoming, where they’ve had terrible fires as a result). The market
speculators are assuming that the price of so many different crops will go up
this fall and winter, they’ll drag the price of other crops along with them.
The markets are probably right. Sugar harvests were poor in Brazil this past
year, and have sent prices of that basic staple up. Corn is the other main
sweetener and bioenergy crop in the western hemisphere, plus it’s a key feed
crop for livestock and poultry, so expect meat prices to go up over the next
year, too. If you can call an economic downturn “fortunate”, we can say we’re
fortunate that, because the US and Canadian economies are slowing down, less
gasoline is being consumed, and so there’s less demand for corn to make
ethanol, a gasoline additive.

At a global scale, this eastern North American drought
promises to be problematic. For the last two decades or so, the world has been
locked into a very dangerous dynamic. On average, global production has been
growing steadily over the last twenty years, but so has global demand for food.
The demand comes from a combination of a growing global human population
generally plus growing rates of per capita food consumption in middle-income
countries like India and China. For global food prices to be stable, we need an
average annual increase of about 2-3% in global grain production just to
maintain a stable market price. Any failure to achieve this annual increase can
trigger rapid spikes in global food prices, which in turn can lead to panic
hoarding and riots in countries heavily dependent on food imports. It’s not
enough to simply produce as much food as we did last year; we must always
produce more year in, year out. Failure to achieve last year’s output, as
increasingly looks to be the case for corn and soybeans this year, spells
trouble. Expect greater political instability in Mexico in particular over the
next year, where corn is a key staple. Mexico’s already struggling with the
fallout of hotly contested elections and a seemingly never-ending war between
the authorities and organized crime; higher corn prices will not help matters.

We’re pretty fortunate here in Ontario. A 10% increase in
food prices here means a box of macaroni and cheese rises from $1.50 to $1.65,
and most of us hardly notice it. We spend only a fraction of our household
income on food (with the exception of residents of the north, where food must
be shipped in at some expense). A great many Mexicans (and people elsewhere)
must spend a much larger portion of their incomes on food. If you only earn a
couple dollars a day and the price of your lunch goes up 15 cents, you notice
it. So while Ontarians will feel a pinch because of the drought (Ontario’s
farmers more so), many people beyond our borders are going to feel much more
than a pinch.

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TedX Talk: Beyond environmental refugees

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My book "Climate and Human Migration: Past Experience, Future Challenges" has been published by Cambridge University Press. Click here to see more or place an order from Cambridge; you can also buy it from Amazon, Chapters, and other online booksellers.

Cornell lecture on climate and migration

If you're interested in seeing the 'long' version of the lecture on which the above TEDx talk is based, please click here to see my invited lecture at Cornell University's International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, given in October 2012.